Rod Liddle

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single ‘My Life’. The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular schtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.

Yes, of course, one sometimes yearns for the old days. The friend who, appearing in court on a charge of racial hatred for having shouted ‘Pikeys!’ at some Gillingham fans, was able to produce a shirt bought in the Gillingham club shop which bore the slogan ‘Pure Pikey’. Case dismissed. And then the case that was not dismissed – another friend, his face contorted with outrage and disbelief, found guilty of violent and abusive language towards the manager of an opposing team. ‘What sort of game has this become, Rod, when you can get done for calling Russell Slade a fat c**t?’ It is hard to say even from my antediluvian standpoint, that things haven’t got better A salient question.

It was to King Charles’s great credit that he refused to fall for the Trump power handshake thing and instead retracted his own hand so that the orange psychotic was left, for a nanosecond, flailing and unsure of what to do with his right arm. It is always good to call the bluff of a bully, because they usually are bluffing. I would have preferred it if Chaz had executed a swift jujitsu move and thrown the President over his shoulder and onto the ground. But one cannot have everything – and of course the King was there to be emollient and to remind Trump of the things he quite likes about the UK: golf and class distinction, basically. He doesn’t seem to like us for any other reason – which is, in fairness, the mindset of almost every previous US president.

I was sorry to see Arsenal lose the ‘Game of the Season’ to Manchester City and thought them a little unlucky. Ok, ‘sorry’ is perhaps stretching it. I don’t care very much. But I would rather Arsenal win the league than those Mancs. Still, Arsenal’s fans deserve what they get for having booed their side at the end of the home defeat to Bournemouth. Spoilt rotten. In the semis of the Champions League and top of the Premier League, even the intimation of defeat has become an anathema to the fans. To be fair to the Gunners faithful, they are by no means alone in this. I’ve noticed over the last couple of seasons home crowds in the Premier League booing when they don’t get the result they wanted.

Hadiza Atunse, a 25-year-old PA, smashed her Toyota Auris into a Mini Cooper, spun out of control and flipped into a hedgerow in Wilmslow, near Manchester. When the coppers turned up, she declined to partake in a breathalyser and the police, mysteriously, did not give her a tongue swab to determine drug use. I say ‘mysteriously’ because the young lady was also found with a large bag of coke in her car.  Later it was discovered that she was driving without insurance. Yet Ms Atunse copped only a £730 fine because the judge seems to have accepted the defence’s argument that she had been suffering from ‘excited delirium syndrome’, which, coincidentally, is what afflicts me in the moments before Bargain Hunt comes on the TV.

I am not convinced that the BBC did very much wrong regarding Scott Mills. No matter how boring the BBC’s seemingly endless retinue of mediocre gay exhibitionists, a man is surely innocent until proven guilty. It may even be that the Corporation treated the bloke unfairly by sacking him, unless they know something that we don’t. Whatever, his departure has affected me less keenly than, for example, the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute or a meteor landing on some exoplanet in the Oort Cloud. What bothers me now and has bothered me for about 30 years is the relentless political bias. If you want the perfect example of this tune into virtually any Radio Four drama. It will almost certainly a) be awful b) concern non-white people being transgressed somehow by whitey.

My friend Will Clouston, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, dropped round with his wife for a bite to eat this week and showed me an ancient book he had picked up in a second-hand store in Hexham. It was titled Select Fables, with cuts designed by Thomas and John Bewick, and it dates from 1784. One little fable commended itself to both of us: The wretch, who works not for his daily bread,Sighs and complains, but ought not to be fed,Think, when you see stout beggars on their stand,The lazy are the locusts of the land. The question isn’t why are so many people swinging the lead, but why on earth aren’t there more?

‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party.

Here’s a mark of our times. A dietician who apparently ‘bluffed’ her way into a top NHS job has been sacked for knowing less about the body and medicine in general than a reasonably well-trained spaniel. The woman claimed great experience in working with nutrition based diseases and even cancer – but colleagues soon discovered she could not identify a feeding tube, did not know what or where the large intestine was, had seemingly never heard of a gall bladder and believed radiology was used to treat heart disease. According to colleagues she lacked even basic knowledge of anatomy. She was struck off the register and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust said it was reviewing its recruitment procedures. Quite right, too.

Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who would have thought there was a darker side to Benny Hill? His harmless and uplifting degradation of women was one of our regular delights, especially the bits where semi-naked babes chased him around parks, with a silly expression on his face, accompanied by fruity music. How we laughed. And so to find out now that all the time he was living a double life as a murderous IRA terrorist is kind of too much to bear.